Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spenglerwas a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. Spengler's civilization model postulates that any civilization is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth29 May 1880
CountryGermany
spiritual soul doers
Every action alters the soul of the doer.
eye one-day gone
One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.
art style development
The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.
school mean leader
To-day a democrat of the old school would demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but mean-time the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to secure their position vis-a-vis the masses.
race too-much
Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.
party ideas together
When three liberals get together they form a new party; that is their idea of individualism. They never join a bowling club without introducing as part of the 'agenda' an 'amendment of the statutes.
path outbreaks socialist
Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
wise clever men
If you are clever enough to figure out what men want, you are either too wise to marry them or too intimidating for them to marry you.
bears extensions
History is direction—but Nature is extension—ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.
world
All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
philosophy defence bottom
Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.
country clever cities
In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.
hero leader world
A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.
christian grandmother theology
Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.